


The Lighthouse or Eurus in quarantine

by AlessNox



Series: Young Eurus Holmes [6]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Horror, Inspiration, Islands, Post-Season/Series 04, Romance, Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:34:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24113629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlessNox/pseuds/AlessNox
Relationships: Eurus Holmes & Reader
Series: Young Eurus Holmes [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/636026
Comments: 9
Kudos: 16





	The Lighthouse or Eurus in quarantine

Quarantine.

Eurus smiles when she hears about it.

Maybe now she’ll will get what she wants.

It’s funny to think of Sherlock and Mycroft and all of the little people locked up inside their houses slowly going mad. Eurus went mad a long, long, time ago.

Then again, things aren’t the same for her as they used to be. There have been changes since Mummy got _“_ _interested in her welfare”_. It was to be expected that she would go on one of her ‘ _missions_ ’, once she found out that a second child of hers had returned from the dead.

Mummy is very persistent when she sets her mind to things. When she saw me, she was angry. She was not to be reasoned with, even though what she asked for was totally unreasonable.

She demanded change, and she refused to be swayed by their arguments that prison was the best way. She was insistent in that way that only a righteous mother can be. And she won.

Mummy had them build Eurus a lighthouse.

Funny, isn’t it. A lighthouse built on a secret government island. It was a ludicrous. It was hilarious. But they said a house would draw too much attention. Another lighthouse though in a sea full of lighthouses. Some old forgotten thing dropped off the maps because of its age. A dot on a tiny dot on a map. People might comment, but they would soon forget it. And it could be useful too. Sometime ships actually did hit the rocks here.

So they brought in cut stone, and piled it up. Men were shipped onto the secret aisle. (Not quite so secret now,) and they built it, brick by brick. Masons were shipped in to cement the stones together. Glass storm panes lifted up by cranes and placed on a tall tower along with a lamp, a cupola, a staircase, a Fresnel lens. Then rock was shorn off the shore. A facade bricked onto the outside to make it look as if it had stood there for a hundred years. The lamp might give it away. The color temperature was wrong to make it look like a period light, but most people are too unobservant to notice such things. Most people hardly think at all.

The lamp was programmed to be controlled remotely, turned on and off by automated controls stored in the prison below. There was a computer that controlled it. It used an algorhythm and turned the light on and off based on the time of day, the weather patterns, and the level of paranoia of the new director of the facility who had a panic switch to cut off the light whenever he wished to. Eurus took over the controls to the light on the day she arrived. This was her home now.

Eurus turns the lamp on during the full moon, or when the hour is a prime number, or whenever. The lamp is on when she wants it to be. Most nights, she leaves it off. Most days, she stands in the tower looking out at the sea. And when the weather is nice, there is the garden to walk in: A wet rocky yard out back that seems mostly designed as a place for potted plants to die.

Mummy sends her potted plants several times a year. Eurus puts them out in the garden, perching them on the stone wall for the storms to blow over. A row of them sits there now, brown husks with rotted stems. The only thing still alive is an ugly pink rose that clings to life on the rocks despite her negligence. It blew over ages ago, but the craggy vines dug into the spaces between the rocks and kept on growing, thorns and all. She kicked the pot. Dumped the dirt out in a fit of pique, but it hadn’t died. It had grown and thrived, its thorny branches spreading so that now they hang over the edge of the low stone wall glistening in the mist spraying up from the sea. She will kill it one day. Eurus is good at killing. She will stomp on its pink blooms, pull out its thorny vines, and destroy it. But she doesn’t feel like doing it now. It is too wet, and the thorns would hurt her bare feet. She still isn’t used to wearing hard shoes.

And if she did do it, and the thorns tore open her skin causing her to bleed, she would have to call the others to fix her, and that would require going into the prison for bandaging. She can’t understand why they won’t just give her a first aid kit, as if she would use the bandages to make a sail and float away. Stupid idiots. All of them. She doesn’t want to ever go back. It is much better to be out of that sterile underground room and up here on the surface. Like leaving Hell and entering Purgatory. Mummy probably thought of it that way. She always was a raging Theist.

Eurus looks out on the rocks that rim the shore. She counts the waves as they crash. Calculates the shape of the curves they form. The maths are aesthetic. One might even call it, pretty. But she also likes to read stories, when she can get them. Stories take her away to other worlds, other lives.

What is her life like?

She stands and looks out of the windows at the sea. In the room below, there is a chair and a writing desk. Mother thought that she might write. But Eurus doesn’t. She isn’t good at writing stories. She hasn’t heard enough normal people to understand how they talk. Instead, she uses the desk to store her hair bands. She has seventy two. Sherlock must have told mother what she said to him so long ago about missing hers, because mother sends them regularly. She gets mail from Mummy every month. Usually it is an envelope slipped into the slot at the heavy metal gate at the terminus of the carved stone walkway that leads down from her front door.

Inside are small things. What is the word for it...knicknacks? She never reads the nonsense that Mummy writes. She throws the letters into a bin. Uses them to feed the fire. She doesn’t keep anything she sends, except for the plants, and the hair bands. She doesn’t even wear them. She got out of the habit years ago. Now she doesn’t remember how to do up her hair. Instead she arranges the bands by color. Sometime she loops them together and makes a belt.

A boat slides into the dock. Men file out of it. One man stops and looks up at the lighthouse. He is a young man with light brown hair beneath his knit cap. He is a new hire. All of the workers are. There was a complete change of staff after the last time she was out. Most workers rush past without looking up at the _witch in the tower_ , and yet this man lingers.

It isn’t the first time that she saw him watching her. Last week, she saw him on the beach watching her calculate the fractals in the waves. Before that, she caught a glimpse of him as she stood out in the garden watching her plants die. It’s easy enough to imagine what he’s thinking when he looks up at her, wasting his free time standing out in the harsh weather to spy on her. He’s a romantic. It’s an easy enough deduction to make. He is young, single, curious, lonely… delusional.

Does he imagine her a princess in a tower? A beautiful maiden waiting for a prince to rescue her?

Mycroft read Rapunzel to them when they were children. A girl locked in a tower with no door. A man climbed up her hair, had his way with her, and then was tricked by a witch and tossed out of the tower to be blinded by a thornbush. She has a thornbush. Is he weighing whether the prize is worth the thorns?

He can not fail to have heard the horror stories the other men tell about her, down in the depths where they gossip in hushed tones about the spider that bewitches and kills all who come near her. But there are always those who are attracted to the danger.

It would be so easy to manipulate him. Even from this distance she could make him to come to her. She need only play the part of his fantasies. Her sad face staring over the garden wall at the sea. A glance over her shoulder while her shawl blows in the breeze behind her. Then becoming more brazen. Staring him full in the face. Standing in the tower and letting the light shine through her white night gown as he goes on his evening walk. Bewitching him without a word. A rope made of hairbands and bed sheets thrown over the garden wall. Spreading her legs as she stands in the tower, the light magnified by the Fresnel lens as it blasts her naked shadow across the midnight waves.

But when she looks down again, the young man has gone. Eurus puts such thoughts away, pushing them out of her mind. Getting out is the last thing she needs now that the rest of the world is growing ill. There is a twenty-nine percent chance that one of those men brought the virus along with him as he arrived. If so, then there is a fifty-two percent chance that the disease will pass among the inmates. There is a seven percent chance that someone has sent an infected person here on purpose hoping to kill off the dangerous island prisoners in order to save the British taxpayers money.

Boring. People’s fear and greed is boring. But Eurus isn’t worried. She likes being alone. Quarantine is nothing new to her.

Before, there used to be maids and nurses, guards and psychiatrists in her room. People cleaning her, prodding her, searching her things. Now, there is no one. If she needs something, she sends a note down to the prison and whatever she needs is delivered the next day.

On cold nights, when the wind howls, she sleeps curled up on a bench in the kitchen. When she wakes, she lets the blanket fall to the floor and she leaves it there. She likes it a little messy. Not like it used to be: sterile, clean, contained. She likes the messiness of the waves crashing against the rocks. The chaos of raindrops boring holes through the hard rock-faces. The wildness of the wind screaming against the stone walls. Screaming like she used to scream ...before.

When the lighthouse was finished, and they were together for their one and only visit, Mummy gave her a key. She slipped it into her pocket when she gave her a hug, the one and only time they were in the room together.

The key locks the tower door, and it only works from the inside.

Eurus never gave much stock to genetics. Never thought that shared chromosomes made any kind of difference in how a person thought, but she may need to reconsider that belief. Because Mummy gave her something that she truly needed. Something she wanted but never had before. Mummy gave her the power to lock everyone else out.

Quarantine.

It was the best present anyone ever gave her.

The End

Postlude:

Eurus sits in the tower and reads. They wouldn’t trust her with a computer, but someone did leave a graphing calculator with a lighted screen down in the basement among the tools. It was a simple thing to patch it into the cable that was supposed to turn the lamp on and off. The computer on the other end is connected to the internet, and although it is primitive. She is able to use it to read.

Her favorite website is _Archive of our own_. She has an account and reads stories there. She writes them too, but like I said, she’s not very good at writing. Not good with tenses, or first and third person. Not good at sounding normal. She doesn’t know how ordinary people talk. She doesn’t know how to talk to ordinary people, like you. She has a favorite author. Can you guess who it is?

My favorite story. Her favorite. The one she will call her favorite (I told you she can’t do tenses) is that story that you are planning to write, the one you haven’t written yet. I can tell the shape of it, but I don’t know the words you will use. I am not good at guessing the words. I have been waiting for you to write it. I have been waiting for a long time, but you acted like you never had the time to write. So, I changed things.

You have a bit more time now, don’t you?

In truth. Mummy had me moved, somewhere else. Somewhere close, very close. Close enough to see the glare of the screen through your window.

I am not good at telling stories. But I am good at reading people. Knowing what they will do. What websites they will read. How to catch their attention. Did you like the bit about the lighthouse?

I get bored when I’m all alone. You understand what its like, don’t you? I read stories to help me pass the time. I want so much to read the story you will write!

Have you started it yet? Do you need more time?

I can arrange that. I am good at arranging things.

I am waiting.


End file.
